CHEST awards grants for quality improvement in lung cancer diagnosis and treatment

Glenview, Illinois – The American College of Chest Physicians^® (CHEST) announces Tamer Said Ahmed, MD, FCCP, and Adam Fox, MD, MS, as the recipients of grants to deploy quality improvement (QI) demonstration projects in biomarker testing for patients with suspected non-small cell lung cancer.

Centered around implementation of institutional and case-by-case checklists into clinical practice, the projects seek to substantiate best practices for ordering biomarker tests.

“Biomarker testing allows for tailored treatment plans that drastically impact the progression of lung cancer, but every hospital system and practice is following a different procedure for testing,” says Dr. Said Ahmed, pulmonary and sleep physician at Toledo Hospital (ProMedica Health System) and Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo. “To best serve the patient, our project aims to streamline the approach to biomarker testing to bridge health care inconsistencies. Given the intense progression of some forms of lung cancer where every week matters, the more streamlined we can make the biomarker testing process, the earlier we will get to an accurate diagnosis, begin treatment and likely extend the life of a patient.”

Discrepancies in the testing process stem from existing silos between specialties including pathology, oncology, interventional radiology and more. Care is fragmented, leading to delays like repeat biopsies because a large enough sample was not taken the first time.

Involved in creating the biomarker checklists, Dr. Fox, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, is the second recipient of a grant to implement a QI project.

“By intent, these checklists help to provide a systematic approach to timely and comprehensive biomarker testing,” says Dr. Fox. “What we need now is to implement them into clinical practice to gain metrics that can be studied, identified and will lead to the process being widely accepted. To truly impact practice, we need to be able to provide strong evidence for interventions that work for clinicians to implement.”

To learn about the initiatives around biomarker testing and more, visit the CHEST Thoracic Oncology Topic Collection.

This project is supported in part by AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Pfizer.

About the American College of Chest Physicians
The American College of Chest Physicians^® (CHEST) is the global leader in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of chest diseases. Its mission is to champion advanced clinical practice, education, communication and research in chest medicine. It serves as an essential connection to clinical knowledge and resources for its 22,000+ members from around the world who provide patient care in pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine. For information about the American College of Chest Physicians, and its flagship journal CHEST^®, visit chestnet.org.